69 – The Romance and Sex Life of the Date

The Kitchen Sisters Present

The Kitchen Sisters & Radiotopia

Society & Culture

4.6 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 25 April 2017

⏱️ 17 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In 1898, the United States Department of Agriculture created a special department of men, called “Agriculture Explorers,” to travel the globe searching for new food crops to bring back for farmers to grow in the U.S. These men introduced exotic specimens like the mango, the avocado, and the date. In 1900, the USDA sent plant explorer, Walter Swingle, to Algeria to study the date. As Swingle took temperature readings and soil temperature, he realized that the conditions were very much like those in California’s hot, arid Coachella Valley, sometimes referred to as the American Sahara. In order to market this new fruit and promote the region, date growers in the Coachella Valley began capitalizing on the exotic imagery and fantasy many Americans associated with the Middle East. During the 1950s date shops dotted the highway, attracting tourists. There was Pyramid Date shop where you could purchase your dates in a pyramid. Sniff’s Exotic Date Garden set up a tent like those used by nomadic tribes of the Sahara. One of the most well known date shops that still exists today is Shields Date Garden, established in 1924. Floyd Shields lured in customers with his lecture and slide show titled, “The Romance and Sex Life of the Date.”

This story was produced in collaboration with Lisa Morehouse.

Transcript

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1:13.2	Thank you very much.
1:14.4	The Shield State Garden is the only place in the world where you can see and hear the
1:26.2	romance and sex life of the day.
1:28.8	Back as far as we have any record of dates, man has cut the male flowers from the male pum and placed them in the of The Romance and Sex Life of the Date, produced with Lisa Morehouse.
1:47.0	There you can see a female flower is starting to open.
1:50.0	The spath has split the little yellow beads on the strands on the
1:55.6	illows, those will be dates. The Halawi and the Barhi come from southern Iraq
2:01.2	around Basra. The tradition goes back thousands of years when
	...

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